Read Online Hide & Find (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 3) by Jerusha Jones - Free Book Online
Authors: Jerusha Jones
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present. I also thought he might actually eat the requested beef stew if he had company.
oOo
Loretta waited a solid five minutes before she started bombarding me with questions about Tarq. And then she grilled me non-stop for the rest of the drive into Woodland.
Yes, Tarq was sick, terminal in fact. Yes, he had been an alcoholic, and yes, the disease that was killing him was liver cancer.
Loretta’s face became even more pinched at my confirmation of this terrible fact. “Once you’re a pickle, you can never be a cucumber again,” she murmured.
I cast a sharp glance her direction and wondered if her resolve to stay clean was getting wobbly. Maybe rubbing elbows with others in her condition wasn’t helpful. But wasn’t that what AA was all about? And I knew she’d been clinging to the hope of a meeting for the last couple days — it manifested as a sort of desperate casualness that had hovered at the periphery of all her conversations.
But she carried on with the questions.
Yes, Tarq was an excellent lawyer, and yes, I told him everything — no secrets. Loretta turned a little wistful at my answer, so I added that while I trusted him with my life, in doing so, I’d also risked his. Which explained why his living room — she’d taken a peek into the cabin’s front room — was shot to pieces. And the threat hadn’t ended with the arrests of Fat Al Canterino, Lee Gomes, and Neil Byrnes. If anything, it was about to become more intense.
“He’s going downhill fast, with little rallies when you give him a problem to solve?” Loretta’s tone turned her question into a statement.
I nodded. Fast was an understatement. Tarq’s coloring and overall physical weakness this morning had rattled me. And now that Ollie was gone — I almost couldn’t bear to imagine Tarq’s emotional state.
He had never mentioned the idea of assisted suicide, but I also knew that he only sporadically took his prescribed medications. He had enough of a stockpile of all kinds of pain killers and other things that he could probably give himself a fatal dose of a drug cocktail at any time.
My throat tightened. I had to keep Tarq busy, give him a reason to get up and around every day. Not that it would be hard, considering my situation. I hoped, when the end did come, that it would be peaceful and content, like Ollie’s.
When Loretta pushed open her door and slid out of the cab in the First Presbyterian Church parking lot, she was more somber than I’d ever seen her.
“I’ll be back at one o’clock,” I called.
But Loretta only waved — more like a twitch, really — and passed through the small cluster of people taking the last drags on their cigarettes outside the basement entrance to the fellowship hall.
oOo
Selma had been spot-on in her speculation about the nature of the key and the location of the safe deposit box. The teller I approached at First Pacific Bank didn’t bat an eye when I made my request and produced the key. She went to fetch the manager.
If appearance was any indicator, there was no way I’d be able to pull a fast one on Mr. Sykes. He was a bit of an oddity for Woodland — precisely parted and gelled black hair and compression wrinkles at the corners of his downturned mouth, dandruff sprinkling the shoulders of the navy suit jacket that was too broad for his shoulders.
In running Skip’s charitable foundation, I’d had lots of experience with the customer service staff of large, international banks. Without exception, I had well established, even amicable, relationships with them, no doubt greased by the long extension of digits in the accounts under my control. They’d always offered coffee or tea and ushered me into their interior, leather-clad offices — the ones with spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.
Mr. Sykes was under no such constraints. He sidled up to me on the public side of the partition and breathed on me with an audible nasal whistle as I explained that I
oOo
Loretta waited a solid five minutes before she started bombarding me with questions about Tarq. And then she grilled me non-stop for the rest of the drive into Woodland.
Yes, Tarq was sick, terminal in fact. Yes, he had been an alcoholic, and yes, the disease that was killing him was liver cancer.
Loretta’s face became even more pinched at my confirmation of this terrible fact. “Once you’re a pickle, you can never be a cucumber again,” she murmured.
I cast a sharp glance her direction and wondered if her resolve to stay clean was getting wobbly. Maybe rubbing elbows with others in her condition wasn’t helpful. But wasn’t that what AA was all about? And I knew she’d been clinging to the hope of a meeting for the last couple days — it manifested as a sort of desperate casualness that had hovered at the periphery of all her conversations.
But she carried on with the questions.
Yes, Tarq was an excellent lawyer, and yes, I told him everything — no secrets. Loretta turned a little wistful at my answer, so I added that while I trusted him with my life, in doing so, I’d also risked his. Which explained why his living room — she’d taken a peek into the cabin’s front room — was shot to pieces. And the threat hadn’t ended with the arrests of Fat Al Canterino, Lee Gomes, and Neil Byrnes. If anything, it was about to become more intense.
“He’s going downhill fast, with little rallies when you give him a problem to solve?” Loretta’s tone turned her question into a statement.
I nodded. Fast was an understatement. Tarq’s coloring and overall physical weakness this morning had rattled me. And now that Ollie was gone — I almost couldn’t bear to imagine Tarq’s emotional state.
He had never mentioned the idea of assisted suicide, but I also knew that he only sporadically took his prescribed medications. He had enough of a stockpile of all kinds of pain killers and other things that he could probably give himself a fatal dose of a drug cocktail at any time.
My throat tightened. I had to keep Tarq busy, give him a reason to get up and around every day. Not that it would be hard, considering my situation. I hoped, when the end did come, that it would be peaceful and content, like Ollie’s.
When Loretta pushed open her door and slid out of the cab in the First Presbyterian Church parking lot, she was more somber than I’d ever seen her.
“I’ll be back at one o’clock,” I called.
But Loretta only waved — more like a twitch, really — and passed through the small cluster of people taking the last drags on their cigarettes outside the basement entrance to the fellowship hall.
oOo
Selma had been spot-on in her speculation about the nature of the key and the location of the safe deposit box. The teller I approached at First Pacific Bank didn’t bat an eye when I made my request and produced the key. She went to fetch the manager.
If appearance was any indicator, there was no way I’d be able to pull a fast one on Mr. Sykes. He was a bit of an oddity for Woodland — precisely parted and gelled black hair and compression wrinkles at the corners of his downturned mouth, dandruff sprinkling the shoulders of the navy suit jacket that was too broad for his shoulders.
In running Skip’s charitable foundation, I’d had lots of experience with the customer service staff of large, international banks. Without exception, I had well established, even amicable, relationships with them, no doubt greased by the long extension of digits in the accounts under my control. They’d always offered coffee or tea and ushered me into their interior, leather-clad offices — the ones with spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.
Mr. Sykes was under no such constraints. He sidled up to me on the public side of the partition and breathed on me with an audible nasal whistle as I explained that I
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